Today I woke up to a frenzy of bird activity just outside my window. I’m currently staying in the upstairs bedroom of my father’s house, which looks out over a privacy row of evergreens planted between suburban residential lots. I woke up late today, around 9:30 or so, which would usually mean no good bird watching, but the main tree was frankly shaking with energy, so much so that the birds would ricochet off the tree and scatter to the drainage pipes nearby or onto the wooden railing skirting the roof.
It’s warmer than it probably should be this time of year, climbing into the high 50s today, and sunny. We’ve had a strange pattern of shifting cold and warm fronts lately: days of bone-aching chill followed by balmy days of t-shirt weather. In this past week they’ve almost formed a daily seesaw. It creates a kind of seasonal vertigo.
There were many birds in the tree today – finches, sparrows, chickadees, cardinals, even a blue jay skirting the edges. It was a pretty cosmopolitan affair, birds in different plumage on adjacent branches, unbothered by one another. The tree felt like a little bird city, full of action. But the notable majority were robins. Robins, everywhere, looking a little pompous as robins do. Weird, I thought. I usually think of them as a spring bird. It turns out I’m wrong, and they are year-round foragers, though they tend to spend the winter time roosting rather than poking around in yards.
Still, poor robins, I thought, it must be so confusing to have a body so responsive to the weather, stopping and starting. It must be exhausting to think you’re settling in for the cold and then wake up to spring-like sunshine and feel an inexplicable urgency to go forage and mate.
And then I realized I was projecting, because I’ve actually been noticing that feeling in myself a lot these days. A kind of constant spiritual misalignment with the weather. I should say I’m generally ambivalent about fall, which I sometimes enjoy but mostly find to be melancholy and depressing. I loved it as a kid, when it meant new pencils, new notebooks, and old friends, but in college I started to associate it with stress and heartbreak. All of my worst breakups have taken place during the fall, which could just be chance, or could be because in fall I tend to get stiff and crabby with cold, and small-hearted as a result. I spend the whole season trying to avoid a deep chill for as long as possible, knowing I won’t fully thaw again until late spring. There are two blissful weeks when the leaves are colorful and the crisp air is invigorating, and then things just go grey.
All of which would seem to suggest I’d be relieved to have a sort of warm fall. But my grudges aside, the one thing I do like is the way fall slows things down. I like the shifting angle of the light and shorter days. As much as I love summer, it can be frenetic and overstuffed – fall thins out the days a bit. The cold air sharpens my thoughts and places me inside at my desk. I quite literally let myself dream more in the fall, when I sleep more and slow down earlier.
This fall has been energetically baffling. I had the fullest possible summer, maybe one of the best summers of my life, traveling to Italy and France, eating and walking a lot, visiting my dear friend and her new baby and husband in their house in the mountains. I was ready for rest. But the warm weather has made me feel restless and ambitious, wanting to put on a dress and meet people. It gives me the feeling that I should be doing something much more than I am doing. Rather than slowing down, letting my thoughts turn over become mulch, I can spend days feeling a displaced sense of urgency. And, at least in Northern Virginia, the mood among my neighbors seems to be similar, with the endless rattle of construction, yard work and restless agitation.
There was a good essay earlier this year that I’m trying to find but can’t about how the aesthetics of fall no longer actually align with the season. October saw the usual shift into autumn marketing – i.e. plaid flannel, pumpkin spice, squash recipes, “coziness” – before the weather had even gotten cold enough to put on layers. The squash were not yet at the farmers’ market. What is a season beyond the idea of it? And are we ready for the seasons we know to become so unfamiliar?
The modern philosopher Wendell Berry has noted the shift from agricultural and natural metaphors to mechanical ones in the way we talk about our own bodies and lives (thinking of ourselves as “machines”, for example, with inputs and outputs). Even more recently, we’ve moved to technological ones – talking about our “bandwidth.” Maybe it’s only fitting that our lives would become more and more untethered from the regulatory timing of the natural world, just as that world is becoming more unpredictable. A computer doesn’t have seasons, after all.
(I want to be clear, I’m not just talking about the four seasons experienced in New England and the Mid Atlantic. Every place has its seasons and so I suspect every place has its unique psychology of them, even if those seasons are more about a shift from wet to dry, or windy to still. The earth is a shifting place – no place is static.)
I suppose the thing I’m trying to say in so many words is, what do we do with fall that doesn’t feel like fall? I feel a spiritual loss at that. It’s already so hard to slow down when the world gives us the right cues to do so. What about when nature seems to insist on activity – when it’s November, and the robins are restless?
1001 words, Day 4/10
Ana Olson 